If Only...
Tarun Tejpal got caught because the woman – his junior colleague – who was sexually assaulted by him had the courage to take him on. But there are hundreds of women – I spoke to many working women in Calcutta after the scandal broke (in which Tejpal, the high profile editor of Tehelka Magazine was accused of molestation) – who have faced some form of sexual harassment at their workplaces and kept their mouths shut. Why? Here is one of the replies. A journalist's. "We live in a city where our own chief minister – a woman herself – calls allegations of a rape by a woman, 'a concocted story', as she had done in the case of the Park Street incident. Can you imagine how humiliating that is for the woman? On top of the trauma of having been sexually violated, the shame of having to face disbelief! Then there is the stigma that somehow the sexual attack was brought on by something that the woman did and so somehow it's her fault. After the Park Street incident, a Bengal cabinet minister asked, 'what was she doing in a nightclub at that time?' So obviously women are wary about bringing up issues of sexual assaults."